What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional profile used to describe a specific target audience, and made from average or typical characteristics and demographics. You are likely to have more than one buyer person for your business.

Once you have your user persona's, you can use them for:

• User testing
• SEO
• Case studies
• Product descriptions
• Navigation

Example

Sarah is 37 years old and works for a global accounting services company.
She is a member of a team of 12 key account managers. She is responsible for three industry verticals with her country.
Sarah is divorced with two school aged children, sharing custody with their father. She lives in a spacious, up market apartment in the city. This suits Sarah who is passionate about her job, often working at the weekend when she doesn't have her children with her. What spare time she does have will be spent at the gym or playing tennis.
Sarah is ambitious and as a high achiever, rarely fails to meet her targets. Because she is impatient and time-poor, struggling to balance career and family obligations, she is very interested in gadgets and software tools to speed up mudane work tasks. She is very internet savvy, having no issues purchasing online, participating in social media or other online activities, and so she often participates in the evaluation of new tools for the business.

On visiting an automation software site, Sarah will be looking for factual, quantifiable information about the features and benefits of a tool. She can be distracted by the user interface and will pick something that looks cool even if isn't the cheapest solution (as long as it does what it needs to).

You can use this persona to answer the question "How will this person approach and buy my product (or service)?"

By analysing this persona you would see that Sarah would want simple information about how something will help her get things done faster. She will have little tolerance for sloppy design or lengthy sign up/registration processes. She will be familiar with some of the more techical terms.

You can go on to decide what language would most suit Sarah's personality and what you need to get that person to buy your product or service .
What would be her goals and motivations – think both Emotional and Logical needs
What information would she need or what action would she take?
How would the site be structured and what functionality would help persuade her to help her?

How to create personas

1. Brainstorm you major audience groups as you know them and group them into types of people (these will be the same as your market segments)
2. Get together as much information as you can about each group. You can do this via interviews, email conversations, surveys, your customer database etc
3. List the major characteristics of each group – the ones that are common in the group including demographics, buying behaviours, motivators, skill level and goals – whatever is relevant
4. Create a few make-believe personas using these major characteristics. Photo's can help and you can even give them names
5. List the tasks these people will want to do on your website, what obstacles would stop them doing it and any questions they may have

Use this as input to the design and later for testing.